ART; Off the Canvas And Onto the Big Screen

By M.G. LORD

Published: December 19, 2004

On a brisk winter day last February, the backyard of a fashionable West Los Angeles house was suffused with artificial summer light. Two women -- the actresses T?Leoni and Cloris Leachman -- sat by the pool, exuding languor beneath a striped umbrella. For the artist D.J. Hall, a West Coast-based realist painter, the movie scene had a d? vu quality; it was based on an almost identical image she had painted nearly a decade earlier. The banana plants and agapanthus were the same, freshly placed in the ground to enhance the resemblance to Ms. Hall's original image. Ms. Leoni wore the shirt that Ms. Hall's model had worn and thumbed through a scrapbook of Matisse-inspired images the artist had had made. Even the polyethylene foam noodles in the pool bore her imprint: she had painted them with designs based on desert flowers.

This tableau vivant was far from accidental. James L. Brooks, director of the movie ''Spanglish,'' in which this scene figures prominently, owns Ms. Hall's painting, and the work, he said, was his ''companion'' while writing the screenplay. It ''perfectly caught a certain upscale woman in Los Angeles,'' he said. Such women have a facade of prosperity and happiness, ''but you can see how haunted they are behind it.''

Before Mr. Brooks hired his production designer, Ida Random, and set decorator, Leslie A. Pope, he brought on Ms. Hall as a consultant. ''When I got the job, the first thing Jim showed me was D.J.'s painting,'' Ms. Random recalled.

By the end of filming, Ms. Hall said, she was stunned by Mr. Brooks' fidelity to her vision. ''It was like seeing one of my paintings come to life,'' she said.

The challenge didn't end with the scene by the pool. Assisted by Jennifer Long, founder of Film Art LA, a Hollywood-based company that finds and licenses artwork for movies, television and commercials, Ms. Random and Ms. Pope secured paintings that contribute to the emotional tone of the movie. Increasingly, production designers have come to view artwork as the visual equivalent of a musical score and to rely on experts like Ms. Long to provide it. ''Over the years I've learned that paintings are critical,'' Ms. Random said, ''because they are usually behind the actors' heads. If a painting is wrong, it can really throw off a scene.''

On ''Spanglish,'' Ms. Random, Ms. Pope and Ms. Hall reviewed every dish, glass and tablecloth used in sets for the house.

The artist also suggested paintings that reflect the taste and economic status of Deborah Clasky, Ms. Leoni's character, a sometimes unsympathetic woman whose good intentions are marred by neurotic behavior. A Carlos Almarez painting of a female jogger, rendered in blue against an intense red background, comments on Deborah's compulsive running. A still life by Janet Fish mirrors the objects in the house: an expensive teacup, freshly cut flowers, snapshots seemingly taken on a family trip.

For digital copies of these paintings and permission to use them, Ms. Pope turned to Ms. Long, a former commercial illustrator who, while working long hours as a production designer, had no time to track the contemporary art scene to select the right work for certain interiors. Charged with creating a New York loft for a sneaker commercial, she found herself desperately searching prop houses and art galleries.

Ms. Long conceived Film Art LA nine years ago to eliminate such scrambling. ''If someone asks me for a painting with a certain type of feeling, I can pull the slides of 10 artists in five minutes,'' she says. She represents artists like Charles Arnoldi, Peter Alexander and Ed Moses, and has found artwork for more than 130 feature films, 60 television shows and 55 commercials. ''When I got started, the industry was accustomed to paying for things like music,'' she recalls. Today, because of heightened awareness that images can also be copyrighted, filmmakers have learned to pay for art, too.

Fees for art range from $500 to $10,000, depending on the fame of the artist, the amount of time the work is on screen, and the size that the work appears in the movie. Not all work is used at the size the artist made it. A 6-by-3-inch painting by Ms. Hall, for example, was blown up to 2 by 4 feet for a wall in the Clasky house.

Breakthroughs in digital reproduction have also been a boon to Ms. Long's business. By copying a work digitally onto canvas -- which she can do at her office -- ''you can put a $30,000 piece of art on a set for a fraction of its cost, and there's no liability if it gets damaged,'' she said.

Though the extensive attention to artworks may seem extreme, ''people see everything,'' Mr. Brooks says. In test screenings of ''Spanglish,'' for example, viewers fixated on a tiny photograph in the bedroom of Deborah and John Clasky's daughter, Bernice. The photo shows her father, played by Adam Sandler, as a young man. But because the likeness bore a slight resemblance to John Kerry, audiences wanted to know why the daughter was making a political statement.

Ms. Long has worked with equally painstaking production designers on other film projects. ''Shopgirl,'' adapted from the novella by Steve Martin, drew on Ms. Long's knowledge of contemporary art to create three fictional gallery shows with artworks that reflect transformations in the main character's temperament. For background images in a bank in ''Spider-Man 2,'' Ms. Long tracked down and received permission to use a social realist mural by Robert Lepper in a classroom of a West Virginia college.

The color palette of each scene is especially crucial to establishing the mood. ''If you paint a room blue, it's going to be a sadder room than a bright yellow room,'' Ms. Random said. Because Deborah and John Clasky have a troubled marriage, not only is their bedroom blue, but it is also dominated by an ominous ultramarine paining. The work, by Cynthia Evans, depicts a rigid woman, eyes clamped shut, standing atop a wedding cake that is bracketed by caged doves: an unambiguous totem of disharmony.

The painting was on the bedroom wall during filming, yet Ms. Long said she does not know whether it will appear in the finished movie. Some of her artists, like one who recently sat in vain through ''13 Going on 30'' for a glimpse of his mural, have learned the hard way that scenes can be cut.

To avoid embarrassment, Ms. Long counsels her artists, ''See the movie first before you bring your whole family.''

Photo: The director James L. Brooks based the look of a scene in his new film ''Spanglish'' on a painting he owns: ''Summer Pastime,'' by the Los Angeles artist D.J. Hall. (Photo Courtesy of Koplin Del Rio Gallery)